I’ve posted about this several times before, but it sticks with me.
I see big bike events best done as self-supported. And little ones, too!
Major events are showing how reasonable this is. Well, they’re major in the culture, anyway, if not in dollars. Like the Tour Divide. Or like the new breed of Gravel Grinders, some of which take a few days to complete. Self-supported enduro bike racing is catching on.
Jay Petervary just set the new bar for RAAM with a 12 day 13 hour self-supported unofficial finish for the 3000+ mile 2011 route. Bravo!
However, he says he now thinks it wasn’t such a sane thing to do. He mentions the harshness and the road-type variety and the car danger as being just plain huge factors. Now, nobody has to push so hard and nobody has to ride an ugly route. But JP wanted to show the RAAMers that the SS mode was viable. He kinda did.
I’m thinking that the lesson here might be that it would be cool to develop either a small road safe paved route across the country — maybe just use the ACA routes — or find a nifty dirt roads way to get across.
The North-South Tour Divide route is mostly dirt. Why couldn’t an East-West passage be as well?
Today’s event scene is showing us that dirt roads don’t have to be slow or nasty. Sure, they can be challenging, but there are ways to deal. Light, wide-tire bikes can be fast and reliable.
Why not just ditch the cars entirely? Dirt road culture is its own thing. Maybe pavement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
OK, there are lots of cars on dirt roads. But far less than on pavement.
And the human culture on backroads can be more REMOTE, which can scare some people. But this is something worth EXPLORING. I think we’ll find that we have as tolerable a culture out there in the boonies as in town. Common sense will do the trick.
